Circadian Arrhythmia

No two ways about it, the past two weeks have sucked. I think I left the apartment only once the entire time, my days and nights have gotten completely reversed, and each day I’m looking more and more like a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski.

The key difference, of course, being that he managed to get some writing done. I did finally finish a first draft, but I can’t remember when I’ve had such a hard time getting something, anything, written. This wasn’t the typical NaNoWriMo-style procrastination and distraction; this was full-on Barton Fink level staring at a big blank sheet of white and not being able to think of a single thing.

Complicating things is the fact that I can’t do all-nighters like I used to. It may be just because I’m old, but I think the resolutions had something to do with it. I mentioned I swore off caffeine a while back, and I’ve also finally weened myself off of sodas in general. I’d estimate in the past month I’ve had three (and that just because I was at Disneyland, and it was force of habit), when in the old days three in one day would’ve been a “healthy” day for me. And I have to think that no longer having a steady flow of sugar is a big part of what makes me drift into unconsciousness right when I most need to be awake.

In the past, I’ve thought of the hours between midnight and three AM as some kind of “magic time,” the time when I feel like every line of code I write is brilliantly and elegantly crafted, and every joke I write is the pinnacle of western humor. That’s almost never the case, of course, but the “magic” is that it feels like it’s true.

Lately, though, it’s been like a constant flat-line, with an occasional blip where I get an idea and then forget it or lose interest less than five minutes later. And I haven’t been able to push things an hour later over the course of a couple weeks to gradually get off-kilter. Instead, I’d be at the computer around 4:30 AM and then suddenly find myself in bed with all the lights turned off at 4:45, without remembering exactly how I’d gotten there. Which is going to make it even more difficult to switch around to sleeping on the same schedule as normal humans. I’d always assumed that Coke was my master, but apparently it’s been Sleep all this time.

I’ve got to spend most of this week down in LA for meetings with my other job. I’m actually looking forward to it — not being in LA, but finally leaving my apartment and talking to other people.

One minorly interesting thing tonight: on the way back from class, I saw two things I’d never seen before in San Francisco — lightning and hail. There was a cold, very light rain as I was walking back to my car. When I pulled out of the garage, the rain had picked up a little bit, but still wasn’t very severe. All of a sudden, there was a bright flash of lightning, and the thunder sounded as if the strike were very close. Then a downpour of hail, so much and so hard that I thought it was actually going to do damage to my car, landed directly on top of me and on the street all around. By the time the traffic light changed, it was all over. This place has the weirdest weather.